Primary Sources: The Invisible Army

In this week’s issue of the magazine, I examine the plight of the Pentagon’s invisible army: the tens of thousands of international laborers doing work for U.S. military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. These “third-country nationals,” as they are known in Army lingo, handle logistics from the indispensable to the trivial. As I say in the article, “Filipinos launder soldiers’ uniforms, Kenyans truck frozen steaks and inflatable tents, Bosnians repair electrical grids, and Indians provide iced mocha lattes.”

My piece focusses on two Fijian beauticians, Vinnie Tuivaga and Lydia Qeraniu. Recruiters from a local employment agency approached Vinnie and Lydia and promised them lucrative gigs in a Dubai hotel salon. All in all, ten beauticians from Fiji signed on, but when they got to the Emirates, they learned that no jobs awaited them there. Instead, they acquiesced to spending nearly a year on U.S. military bases in Iraq giving manicures, pedicures, and facials to the troops, and for a fraction of the wages they’d been promised back at home.

Upon arriving in Iraq, Vinnie signed a labor contract with a Turkish subcontractor. (She kept it tucked away in her Bible during her time in the war zone, and she’s granted us permission to post it online.)

(Click on the arrows in the lower-left corner to expand the contract and read my annotations.) It’s a strange document, requiring Vinnie to attest:

I am willingly and of my own free will have decided to go and work in Iraq and I declare that no one in Fiji or out of Fiji has approach [sic] me to work in Iraq.

But the basic terms of the deal—wages, hours, vacation time—are relatively standard, based on the dozens of other labor contracts I’ve examined from Pentagon subcontractors over the course of the past year or so. For instance, one worker’s contract for a “head chef” position with Najlaa International Catering Services, a Kuwait-based company, includes this clause:

In case of employee performing any strike or stop working the employee will pay an amount of 2500 USD for disrupting the work.

Workers for this same company allege that, in 2008, they were held in a warehouse outside a major U.S. base in Baghdad with no pay and little food; after several months, they rioted. (A representative of Najlaa’s associate firm in Amman, Jordan, blamed the workers’ mistreatment on a temporary “cash money problem,” and the U.S. military eventually intervened on the workers’ behalf.)

Last year, the largest U.S. military base in Baghdad saw riots from more third-country nationals employed by another major subcontractor, Gulf Catering Company. These workers—who had been offered salaries as low as three hundred dollars a month to work seven days a week, twelve hours a day—accused their employer of failing to pay their wages on time.

These sorts of alleged abuses persist despite a 2006 Department of Defense investigation into foreign workers’ mistreatment on U.S. bases, which led the military to institute some meaningful reforms. (This inquiry was prompted, in no small part, by great reporting on the topic by journalists like T. Christian Miller, David Phinney, and Cam Simpson.) But labor contracts like the ones I’ve annotated still abound. And the stories of women like Vinnie remind us that fly-by-night Pentagon subcontractors and rogue recruiters continue to sell false promises to Third World workers who dream of better lives.

Photographs by Peter Van Agtmael/Magnum.

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